Buildpacks is an open-source project that converts app source code into images that can be run on any cloud.
The goal of the project is “to unify the buildpack ecosystems with a platform-to-buildpack contract that is well-defined.”
Buildpacks use modern container standards and thus can take advantage of capabilities like cross-repository blob mounting and “rebasing” image layers on Docker API v2 registries, the project maintainers explained on the project’s website.
It includes other features like advanced catching, Bill of Materials, support for multiple languages, reproducibility, and reusability.
Its history goes back to 2011, when the tool was created at Heroku. In 2018 Heroku teamed up with Pivotal to officially create the project. It was accepted into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in October 2018 and became an Incubating project two years later in November 2020.
Buildpacks has been adopted by a number of companies since then, including Cloud Foundry, Google App Engine, GitLab, and Knative.
